rest of us were restrained and polite and chaste.
It really doesn’t seem to bother him that I’d caught him the act.
Sure bothered the hell out of me.
I’m bothered. I can barely sit still.
“Even Paris has city limits,” I say, as though I know something about the world outside my own borders. “Amsterdam too. Eventually every city ends.”
“Not if I had my way.”
“Oh, really?” I don’t know why I’m challenging him. It’s not even a disagreement, really, but I feel like I’ve got to stand my ground somehow, after what I saw today. Otherwise I’m going to feel helpless. Out of control of the situation. “What, you’d pave the world and put up infinite skyscrapers?”
“I am running a robotics company. You think I don’t have a vision? But no, since you put it that way, I don’t want infinite skyscrapers. What I want…”
He pauses, and it makes me look at him. His eyes are so dark. He’s gone unreadable.
“What do you want?”
“I never understood why my dad insisted on building his company here. Why Georgia? Why not somewhere exciting, somewhere north, somewhere west? The other rich guys around here were repellent. I couldn’t be friends with any of them. There’s a certain entitlement, when your money comes from the land. I don’t know how else to describe it, it’s like some kind of sick, decayed aristocracy from before the industrial revolution. I only understood people whose families ran factories. They had machine oil in their blood, you know? Smokestacks. The dirty, unpleasant work that built this country. There’s something more honest about them. They know that money comes and goes. Factories burn, entire industries fall by the wayside. They know the taste of fear.”
The passion in his voice catches me off-guard. I expected a joke, some half-cynical repartee. Instead I’ve been given this little glimpse inside him, and suddenly I feel so close to him in a way I can’t describe…
In a way I must not describe, because I’m not allowed to feel it.
He’s waiting for a response but I’m tongue-tied.
He shakes his head. “Nevermind. Just an occupational hazard of running with millionaires and billionaires. Not something you’ll have to worry about, I guess.”
My laugh startles me as much as it does him. “Yeah,” I say, “I know nothing about rich guys.”
Recognition dawns on his face, and I realize an interesting thing. He’d forgotten about the club.
For a moment, at least, we were just two people sitting in a car. Not a waiter from, and a patron of, a club catering to the richest men in the city.
“I guess you would know a thing or two,” he said.
It’s the first time the club has come up since the day he offered me the job. Like we’ve been careful to avoid the subject.
“Listen—” he says, at the same time I say, “Look—”
When I let him go first, he just says, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For… God, are you going to make me spell it out? For earlier. The shower.”
“I shouldn’t have walked in on you.”
“I shouldn’t have…been doing…that.”
God, he’s uncomfortable and I kind of love it? Colby is a master of his own emotions. He’s so careful, it’s rare to see him caught off-guard like this.
“It happens,” I say. “I didn’t think anything of it.”
“No, it doesn’t happen. Not to me. Not in my company. When I hired you, it was with the express goal of getting you out of that situation, getting you away from people who were going to use you.”
It almost sounds like he’s apologizing not just for what I saw…but for what was going on in his mind while he did it.
I don’t want to be intrigued by that, but I am. I can’t help it. The idea that he was gripping his cock while thinking of me?
I’d just assumed…
I mean, I’d figured…
Why doesn’t he just crash the car into a tree or something and put me out of my misery? I don’t want to be confused. I don’t want to misinterpret what he’s telling me. But I sure as hell don’t want to ask, either.
“Thank you for saying that.” My voice is softer than I expected, almost too quiet.
“I wanted you to feel safe with me.”
“I do.”
His eyes cut over to me. “That’ll never happen again. I promise.”
How can I tell him that it breaks my heart a little to hear that?
That the minute the surprise died this morning, all I wanted to do was rush back into that bathroom, join him in the shower?
I can’t want that, it’s